[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Pornography of Political Fear

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (January 21 2009)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


In most respects, despite the media hoopla, yesterday was an ordinary
day. Amid brisk January weather, one of the world's large nations marked
the installation of a new chief executive with the usual round of
ceremonies and celebrations. The transition was orderly to the point of
dullness; the retiring president and his replacement had coffee together
in the White House before the ceremony, and afterwards walked together
with every evidence of cordiality to the helicopter that would ferry one
of them back into private life.

I am not sure how many people noticed that the clatter of rotor blades
as that helicopter took off put a period at the end of some of the most
extravagant rhetoric of the Bush era. For the past eight years, a great
many voices had insisted that the weary Texan who left the White House
yesterday was about to declare martial law, suspend the Constitution,
cancel all future elections, order dissidents to be rounded up and
interned in concentration camps built by Halliburton, and a great deal
more of the same kind. If, dear reader, you were one of the people who
spent George W Bush's presidential terms insisting that these things
were about to happen, grab a beer from the fridge and have a seat,
because we need to talk.

The rumors I've just described were very nearly an article of faith
across large sectors of the American left in the years just past.
Hundreds of websites and a sizable number of talk radio programs
presented them as matters of simple fact, and vied with one another to
accuse the Bush administration of the most diabolical intentions. Those
who pointed out that the purveyors of these ideas never quite got around
to offering the least scrap of evidence to back them tended to be
dismissed with scorn. Yet the fact remains that all those claims were
quite simply wrong.

It's a bit uncomfortable to be the one who points this out, because I am
no fan of George W Bush. I voted against him in two elections, and have
never regretted either vote. He and the neoconservative movement that
used him as its sock puppet did a great deal to damage the country I
love. Yet it's always seemed to me that a person should be criticized
for the things he does, not the intentions that his worst enemies impute
to him. Bush was certainly a bad president; he may even, as many of
those enemies have claimed, be a bad person. Somehow, though, it seems
to have been forgotten that these points do not justify telling lies
about him.

The enthusiasm with which those rumors were minted and spread is all the
more ironic, in that some of the people who participated most eagerly
were among those who complained bitterly when right-wing pundits and
websites meted out the same treatment to Bill Clinton during the
latter's two terms. I think most of us who were around at that time
heard more than our fill about UN troop convoys rolling down American
highways, black helicopters crisscrossing the skies, and Clinton's
personal plan to put America under the yoke of a tyrannical world
government that would send gun owners and evangelical Christians to
concentration camps. Those stories were just as unsupported by evidence
and disproven by events as the equivalent claims about Bush, or the
flurry of similar stories already beginning to circulate about President
Obama.

The last two decades, in fact, have seen the rise of what might best be
called a pornography of political fear in America's collective
discourse. Like other forms of pornography, it flattens the rich
complexity of human interaction into a one-dimensional world in which
abstract shapes and motions stimulate unthinking reactions from the
brainstem levels of its viewers. It thus debases what it claims to
describe, even as it pursues whatever raw sensation it evokes further
and further away from any human reality. The payoff of the pornography
of political fear is different from the one experienced by those who
have their hands down inside some less metaphorical pair of shorts, but
it is every bit as reflexive, and its results can be just as messy.

The nature of that payoff deserves some discussion here. Hate in
contemporary America has much the same status given to some other words
with four letters in earlier times: a great many people affect to
despise it, and condemn those who practice it publicly, while thirsting
for the chance to engage in it themselves. The pornography of political
fear appeals precisely because it provides a culturally sanctioned
opportunity to indulge in the forbidden pleasures of unrestrained hate.
The intoxication of feeling justified, and even virtuous, while
wallowing in hatred for an irredeemably evil Other is a potent force in
today's culture - and it may yet become an equally powerful factor in
tomorrow's politics, with disastrous results.

An earlier post on this blog explored the way that terms such as
"fascist" have been stripped of their contexts and turned into
all-purpose epithets with no other meaning beyond "I hate you". This
common pattern of rhetoric makes it difficult to draw any useful lesson
from the bitter history of 20th century totalitarian governments, but
the effort needs to be made, because certain features of contemporary
culture display unwelcome similarities to the conditions that helped
those earlier nightmares claw their way into waking life.

One of them is precisely this habit of allowing pornographic fantasies
of political evil to pass unchallenged as reasonable discourse. In the
decades leading up to the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and
1930s, rhetoric no more heated than today's torrents of partisan
vilification spread through all sides of the political controversies of
the day. This did much to create an atmosphere of collective hatred in
which it no longer seemed unreasonable, to far too many people, to
single out one group within society as the source of all its problems -
and set out to remove those problems by exterminating their supposed source.

More than two thousand years ago, much the same process was mapped out
in precise detail by a long line of Greek philosophers, who explored the
ways that the republics of the classical world gave way to tyranny. The
key to the process, according to many of these ancient witnesses, was
the rise of bitter factional struggles over wealth and power that spun
so far out of hand that the machinery of civil government broke apart
and the rule of a tyrant became the only alternative to chaos and civil
war. In a nation where a noticeable number of members of either party
don't seem to be able to walk past a picture of the other party's
candidate without screaming obscenities at it, we are closer to that
outcome than most people realize.

Such habits flourish these days because representative democracy has
always been an easy target for its critics. Abuses of power and displays
of rank incompetence happen in democracies and closed societies alike,
but in democracies they are more likely to become public knowledge and
can be denounced in comparative safety - those people who fling the word
"fascist" at today's democracies, for example, can do so without having
to worry in the least about being dragged from their beds in the middle
of the night by armed men in jackboots and hauled away to a prison camp.
Since politics in a representative democracy requires a constant process
of compromise among competing pressure groups and power centers,
furthermore, it's rare for any side to get everything it wants, and this
breeds dissatisfaction with the system.

That in itself is no vice - reasoned dissent is the lifeblood of a
republic - but when dissatisfaction festers into the insistence that
one's own side ought always to get everything it wants, and the habit of
demonizing the other side for standing up for its own interests and
hopes for the future, something has gone terribly wrong. It may be one
of the bitterest ironies of the next few decades that those who label
their political enemies as fascists, by that very act, are helping to
build a climate of political hatred, and contempt for flawed but
functioning democracies, that could make something like fascism
inevitable in today's America - and a future totalitarian state, it
bears remembering, could as easily arise from today's political left
wing as from the right.

It may already be too late to avoid that experience. Still, the effort
is worth making, and one place to start is a principled rejection of the
pornography of political fear. So, dear reader, when somebody tells you
that Barack Obama is personally plotting to enslave you - and you will
hear that claim in the near future, if you have not heard it already - I
suggest that at the very least, you ask for some evidence more
convincing than the splutterings of a fringe media personality or a
conspiracy theory website that made exactly the same claims about
Clinton and Bush. If we are going to get through the unraveling of
industrial civilization with anything like a functioning society, the
bad habits of rejecting the claims of a common humanity, demonizing
political disagreement, and projecting the shadows of our own
frustrations and failures onto the faces of our political enemies, are
luxuries we can no longer afford.
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/01/pornography-of-political-fear.html


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